Floors: (20 page)

“Looks like I might get this one,” said Remi. “I wonder why?”

But that was not to be. Instead, the finger filled in a different name.

Remi looked at Leo, who didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he was smiling.

“The box is for your
dad
?”

“Uh-huh,” Leo answered, then he turned for the box and quietly moved through the water. “Be very quiet and careful; they’re sensitive.”

“Who are?” asked Remi.

“That smell of apple juice comes from only one flower, Remi. My mom never dreamed of trying to grow one, because it’s the rarest flower in the world. But she told us about it: the ghost orchid.”

“Cool,” said Leo.

They both leaned over, staring into the white box, and there it was. The rarest flower of them all, in a full bloom of white.

“That’s a cool-looking flower,” said Remi. “And I don’t even like flowers. You’re right — it’s like magic. And look — the box is made to hold it. It’s got lights in the lid and on the floor. It’s perfect.”

The key card vibrated once more, and a final message appeared.

“It’s okay,” said Remi, seeing that Leo wished they could go together. “My mom and I don’t get here until seven, anyway. Good luck, bro.”

Leo shut the lid on the box and gently picked it up. When he did, a door popped open on the wall to the left of the field of flowers. There were white stairs leading down, which would take them back to the Flying Farm Room.

Where Ms. Sparks awaited them both.

L
eo left Remi in the upper part of the hotel and crept down to the basement with the box. They both agreed that Remi would play the decoy, drawing Ms. Sparks away if she appeared. The last person they wanted getting her hands on such a special box was old beehive head.

As Leo walked, the box dimmed slowly from light to dark. Night for the ghost orchid had come. Opening the door to the basement, Leo saw lights flashing against the walls.

“Oh no, more trouble,” he said to himself. “At least the siren isn’t going off.”

As he crept down the stairs and peered around the corner, he saw, to his relief, that his father wasn’t there.

What was not so relieving was the state of the call center. Daisy had spit out a rolling pile of twisted paper that looked like it was a mile long … and she was still going. The ticker tape of broken things in the hotel kept getting longer and longer, and all the lights on the call center wall were flashing. Leo had never seen the call center so wild with activity, so wild, in fact, that steam was pouring out of the corners of the wall. It looked like the entire thing might explode at any moment.

But why no siren? Leo inspected the call center more closely and saw that someone — probably his dad — had cut all the sound wires, which dangled and sparked against the wall.

“He must have grown tired of all the noise,” Leo said, speaking this time to the ghost orchid hidden in the box. “Good thing. I know how loud noises bother you.”

The ghost orchid was delicate. It bloomed over and over in the summer, but only if the conditions were right. Too much clatter or a storm — anything like that and the flower would close and might not ever open again.

“Better get you safely hidden away,” said Leo, stepping over piles of ticker tape on the way to his cot.

As he slid the box under his bed, he took note of the four boxes that had gathered there: first the purple one, then the blue, then green, and now white. Four boxes.

He was arranging them just so when the door to the basement opened. He stood up, leaning against the washing machine as casually as he could. He expected to see his father, racing back for tools to fix this or that, but when he looked up, it was Ms. Sparks. She had Remi by the ear, and he bounced down the stairs behind her, yelling for Leo to run.

“Shut up, enchilada!”

Leo looked at the tiny window above his cot and wondered if he could reach it, climb through, and run for the gate. He was
that
scared by the look on Ms. Sparks’s face.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get to the Puzzle Room,” she said. Leo could practically feel her icy cold breath. “NOW!”

Leo was terrified that the booming voice of Ms. Sparks would kill the ghost orchid before he even had a chance to give it to his father. The thought sent him scurrying for the door, right past Ms. Sparks as she slapped him on the back of the head.

Looking back, Leo saw that Ms. Sparks was eyeing the basement, walking farther into his home without being invited. She dragged Remi behind her and stood before the call center.

“Are you coming?” asked Leo from the top of the stairs.

“I’ll leave here when I please, and not a moment sooner,” said Ms. Sparks, looking at the boiler, the shelves of boxes, the washing machine. The cots.

“I’m going, then,” said Leo, trying to distract her. “I’ll be in the Puzzle Room, like you asked.”

“Take your friend with you,” said Ms. Sparks, letting Remi go with a twist of her hand, as if she were snapping her fingers with his ear in between.

“Just so you know,” said Remi, “that really hurt.”

“GET OUT!” she screamed, and Leo’s heart broke again. What rare and beautiful flower could possibly live in the same space as Ms. Sparks’s shrill voice?

Neither boy spoke as they walked through the lobby and into the Puzzle Room, having no idea what they might find there. All Leo could think about was Ms. Sparks finding all four boxes, which would mean she’d know about the secret rooms. What then? What would she do? He was sure she was behind all the trouble at the hotel, sure it had been her at the gate with the black car, plotting the hotel’s demise with a shady developer. She was driving down the price of the hotel and getting a piece of the action. Or worse, she would
own
the Whippet with someone’s help. It was a complete and total disaster in the making. Still, even those dark thoughts didn’t prepare Leo for what awaited him in the Puzzle Room.

“You two are slow, slow, slow!” yelled Ms. Sparks, who had crept up behind them and was now pushing them forward.

“Sit down, there,” she said, pointing to the only empty chairs in the room.

Leo’s dad was sitting in the room, too, along with Remi’s mom and Mr. Phipps. It was the entire Whippet hotel staff: the hotel maid, the gardener, and the maintenance man. And Ms. Sparks, the hotel manager, was about to come unglued.

“I understand there was a party tonight,” she began, clicking her fingernails on the long table that held the puzzle. “Which surprises me, since I wasn’t invited. No one likes to be left out when there’s a party, wouldn’t you agree,
Mr. Phipps
?”

She said it like an accusation, like she knew he hadn’t attended the party.

“I don’t know about any party,” he said, calm and collected as he always was. “You had to wake me up for this meeting, remember?”

“Silence!” shouted Ms. Sparks, her hand in his face. “Have you toured the grounds since I woke you? I suppose not. When you do, you’ll find that someone has made a fool of you!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Ms. Sparks knew how much Mr. Phipps liked working on the puzzle, futile as it was, and how he especially liked to stack the pieces into groups that looked the same. She swept her hand across one of the neatly organized piles and sent puzzle pieces flying across the room.

“That’s just mean,” said Remi a little too loudly. Ms. Sparks gave him the evil eye.

“I’ll deal with you soon enough,” she said, turning back to the gardener, who wouldn’t look her in the eye.

“What you will find,” Ms. Sparks continued, “is that someone has taken shears to your beloved bushes.”

“Why, that’s impossible,” said Mr. Phipps, but he was clearly shaken. “I would have heard —”

“Ahhhh, you
would
have heard, if you weren’t at a party.”

“But I wasn’t at the party!” said Mr. Phipps. All he really wanted to do was get up and go look at his garden, but Ms. Sparks wasn’t about to let him off that easily. Leo and Remi glanced at each other — Mr. Phipps
hadn’t
been at the party, or at least they hadn’t seen him there.

“They’ve cut up all your sculpted bushes — the ducks, the rabbits — all of them.”

“What?!” cried Mr. Phipps. “But that’s — well, it’s —” He couldn’t find the words to say. He’d spent years training the bushes and he loved the garden at the Whippet. It was probably the cruelest thing a person could do to a gardener.

Ms. Sparks seemed satisfied to have tongue-tied Mr. Phipps, so she moved on, pointing her long finger at Remi’s mom.

“And you, responsible for keeping this place clean and tidy. What were you doing at a party when you’re being paid to clean rooms?”

“I … well …” Pilar looked at Mr. Fillmore, but there was nothing he could do. “I’d already cleaned all the rooms, and —”

“Save your excuses!” said Ms. Sparks. “Maybe if you’d been attending to the hotel instead of dancing the night away, we wouldn’t have a theft to deal with.”

“A what?” asked Leo’s dad, the first two words out of his mouth since they’d arrived in the room. There had never, ever been a theft of any kind in the five years he’d been the maintenance man. This was bad.
Very
bad. They always blamed the help.

“A theft,” Ms. Sparks repeated, like she was talking to a room full of schoolchildren. “Someone has stolen Mrs. Yancey’s diamond necklace.”

Pilar gasped, for she had seen the necklace in the Cake Room, lying unattended on a black velvet cloth in the bedroom. She’d been dusting the pink cupcake chairs and there it was.

“I see from your expression you know the necklace of which I speak,” said Ms. Sparks, leaning over the shaking Pilar. Remi couldn’t help but notice the spider was gone, but oh, how he wished he had it back again. What he wouldn’t give to drop it down Ms. Sparks’s pants right about now.

“That necklace,” said Ms. Sparks, “is worth more than all your salaries put together for the rest of your lives. She’s convinced one of you took it. So am I.”

“Well, of course she is,” said Clarence Fillmore. “Who else is she going to blame?”

“Not that spoiled kid of theirs, that’s for sure,” said Leo, which earned him an evil eye of his own from Ms. Sparks.

“Quiet! All of you!” shouted Ms. Sparks, turning her attention to Pilar. “I examined the contents of your pushcart, and I think you know what I found.”

Ms. Sparks pulled the long diamond necklace slowly out of her pocket.

“I don’t believe you,” said Clarence Fillmore. “None of us do.”

But Ms. Sparks had already moved on, happy to have Clarence take center stage as she put the necklace back in her pocket.

“And finally, you, Mr. Fillmore; you with the tools and the belt and the overalls. You
look
like a maintenance man. What I can’t figure out is why you don’t act like one.”

“We can’t help it if someone is sabotaging the hotel,” said Leo. “Things are breaking faster than we can fix them, and you know it.”

“All I know is that you were at a party, and while you were, the hotel fell into ruin. I couldn’t find the maintenance crew, so I went searching. And do you know what I found?”

“Uh-oh,” said Remi.

“Yes, uh-oh indeed, Remilio. I found
you
.”

Ms. Sparks pointed at both Leo and Remi.

“You were not at the party after all, were you?”

“We
were
at the party,” Leo protested. “We just left for a minute.”

“Oh, come now. You know that’s not true. You were missing a long time. Long enough to cause all sorts of new problems, right? I mean,
really
, who would know better than you, Leo Fillmore, how to break things in this hotel?”

Leo and Remi and Mr. Fillmore all protested, but Ms. Sparks had the loudest voice of them all, and she silenced them. “Here’s what I think. I think you’re all in this together. I think it’s all an elaborate setup. And do you know what else?”

Everyone sat silently, because they knew what was coming. She was the hotel manager. She could do it in Mr. Whippet’s absence if she chose to. If he ever returned, she would simply say they’d stolen from one of the guests. She had always known how to get what she wanted from Merganzer D. Whippet.

“Here we go,” Remi whispered to Leo. “Nice knowing you.”

“You are all, each and every one of you,” said Ms. Sparks, drawing in a great breath of air and pausing for effect, “FIRED!”

Mr. Phipps seemed not to care in the slightest, and the moment she said the word, he left the room to inspect the damage in the garden he’d put so much work into. He cared an awful lot about the Whippet. If he really were to leave, the grounds would never be the same.

Pilar looked at Leo’s father, and Leo had the feeling that something might have bloomed, if only they’d had more time. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the idea,
but he wanted more than anything for his dad to be happy again. He’d been thinking that maybe the Fillmore men were finally ready to move on.